


Widower

by kittybenzedrine



Series: Timelines [25]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Sad with a Happy Ending, widower
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-05 23:38:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13398702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittybenzedrine/pseuds/kittybenzedrine
Summary: Ren knows Leo was married before he met her, and knows that the marriage ended tragically. He doesn't much talk about his dead wife, and Ren ends up looking through some of the wife's old things.Leo finds it strange when more pictures start appearing on the mantle._____All pieces of the Timelines series are standalones and can be read without context.





	Widower

Ren doesn't mean to snoop. She gets in the hall closet with the intent to clean, trying to dig through the recesses of junk and boxes to find his sorry excuse for a vacuum. The thing sucks as much as her cheating high school ex-girlfriend and does about as good of a job. It's going to take Ren like twenty minutes just to vacuum up the small amount of cheeze-it crumbs, because she's not leaving it for three days for their housekeeper to get to. She's not an ass, and she's not a slob.

She knows he keeps some of his dead wife's stuff in the hallway closet. Some of her favorite clothes, some of her stuff that he couldn't part with. Boxes with unknown contents, things that it belonged to... Her. Ren feels weird referring to Camilla by name, having never known the woman. Leo's only spoken her name a handful of times in the year and a half that he and Ren have been together. 

Ren has never really looked through any of it, because it's not her place to. Glanced at some of the clothes while looking for some of Leo's suit jackets, and that's about all. But her curiosity gets the best of her, and she abandons her search for the vacuum and looks though the clothing hanging on the rack.

There are a couple of dresses of varying styles and colors, none that particularly stick out to her. There's a pretty peach colored one that has a nice texture at least, she can see why Camilla would have liked it. A few shirts hang, most are nice blouses, but others are worn out t-shirts and tank tops. Skirts, torn jeans, and at the very farthest side, out of view and out of the way is a clear dry cleaning bag.

It's blatantly a wedding dress. From Ren's obsessive wedding planning as a teenager, she identifies it as "mermaid cut". It's short sleeved, with beaded flowers all down the bodice and to where Camilla's knees probably would have been. The bottom fans out in fluffy fabric, and fuck the dress is absolutely gorgeous. A few beads have come loose though, sitting at the bottom of the bag, and it's definitely staring to yellow from sitting in a closet for almost nine years.

She puts it back from where it came. In the bottom of the closet, pushed away, there's a white pair of heels that undoubtedly went with it.

In the first box she pulls out, several pictures sit on what looks to be a photo album. The picture on the very top is of Leo and Camilla's wedding day. She's gorgeous, small and slender in her beautiful dress. She's absolutely beaming. She can see why Leo loved her. There's something in her eyes that shines straight through like sunshine. Camilla is bright and beautiful.

And Leo. He looks so young, so gorgeous at 21. There are fewer lines on his face, no crows feet at the corners of his eyes. There are so few pictures of him that she's seen, less than a fifth are from before he was twenty-five. He's beautiful, still more bone than muscle from his poor upbringing, but he looks lovely in his tux, with a simple gold band just barely visible on his left hand.

On the back in silver sharpie is simply the date and "Leo and Camilla's wedding". Ren smiles a little bit when she notices that a small scribble before "Leo" was the start of his name before he legally changed it. Whoever wrote on the back must have still been getting used to writing "Leo" instead.

Underneath that one are other key moments in his life from before Ren, ones of him and his closest friends. A bunch of scrawny homeless kids who fell through the cracks of the system, with only each other to rely on. Some photos from his high school years, a few of a close friend who died long before Camilla did. A handful more from his wedding day. From the sound of it, there are a few more under the photo album, but she doesn't get it out. 

She closes up the box and puts it back where she got it from. She feels kind of wrong now, for going through it, but she's got some small plan forming in the back of her head. Really, she just hopes Leo will be okay with it.

 

 

For the first time in months, Leo jerks awake from a nightmare that night. He sucks in air like he hasn't been breathing, sits up ramrod straight and stares at what used to be the bedroom closet. Ren touches him, kisses his bare shoulder and assures him it was only a dream, just a dream. He doesn't pull his eyes away from the closed door.

She gets up, crosses the room and looks back at him. He looks almost scared as she touches her hand to the knob. The door opens, and she flicks on the light.

There's nothing in there but an empty bathroom. It isn't a closet anymore. There's nothing in there or anything out of place, certainly not his wife half conscious, half dead, hanging by her neck from the bar. No crutches lying on the floor, abandoned when they were supposed to hold her up. No crippled, unable leg, permanently damaged by an accident that he caused, that he couldn't prevent. No beautiful face swollen and purple from hanging there for hours.

His tears are silent, and Ren's kind enough to not look at him while she comforts him. She feels like it's her fault that he had the nightmare, because she had to go digging up ghosts when she shouldn't have.

 

 

"What are you doing?" Leo asks, about a week after the incident.

Ren's sitting on the bedroom floor, with photographs and picture frames surrounding her. She looks up at his face. "The mantle on the fireplace is bare as fuck. I wanna be that cheesey couple with pictures all over it. You know, some of us, some of your friends, a few of the nieces and nephews, your godchildren. All that cutesy shit."

True to her word, when he comes home the next day there's pictures all over the mantle. It's nice enough, and she put up a particular favorite of his. They're squished together, shoulder to shoulder. He's looking over at her, one brow pulled up but his lip curled just enough that you can tell he's smiling. And Ren's beaming at the camera, bright and beautiful.

He notices the pictures look different a few days later, but he figures she rearranged it. Yet again, a few more days pass and he's certain something is different this time. Leo decides to see what she's moved.

There are a few new pictures. Well, new to the mantle, as they're mostly old photos. One of him and his closest friends when they were teenagers, another group shot from when he came into money at 21 with the whole group together, clean, healthy, smiling. Camilla is up against his side in that one, and he feels his lip quirk into a smile of its own volition.

The rest of the photos are mundane shots of various points on time. Only one "new" photo has been added, one of him holding one of Ren's nieces. Tabitha has adored him from the moment she met him, and he can see the love in her little face through the grainy cellphone picture. 

Ren keeps adding pictures over the next few weeks, just one or two every couple of days. He catches one or two with Camilla in them, and he wonders how long it took for Ren to finally go through his dead wife's things. Ren could have only gotten the pictures out of a box of Camilla's stuff. Leo doesn't even really bother to look at any of the pictures, he'll get a good look once she hasn't added any for two weeks. 

Or, at least that's what he thinks. Because he comes in the door one evening and even across the room, from out of the corner of his eye, the photo is unmistakable.

He still remembers his wedding day fondly. Camilla's smile, the feeling of freshly manicured hands on his skin. He was barely 21, her already 25. Sometimes he gets her wedding dress out just to remind himself what it felt like, since the scent of Camilla's perfume has long faded from it. The heels don't even have indentions from her wearing them, they hurt her feet too much but it didn't matter once he carried her across the threshold. She only wore them that once.

The picture is in a clear frame, and it's right up front and center with the one of him and Ren. The two women are so very different from each other, compared so close. Camilla is small and dainty, dynamite in a pretty package while Ren is as big and bold as her personality. It's a stark contrast.

Ren's curled up on her phone when he comes to the bedroom door. He leans against the frame and waits for her to take notice of him.

"What?" she asks. 

"Why did you put those photos up?"

Her face remains neutral, but so does his. Panic swims behind her eyes, he can tell she's wondering if she did something wrong. But she doesn't speak right away, instead she looks around like she's searching for the right words.

"I don't say this to offend you," she says after thinking, "but I wouldn't want you to put me in a box and lock me away in the closet. She's part of your history, and even though things ended the way they did, you don't have to put her away forever."

He doesn't say anything, so she continues. "I mean. It's a little soon to be thinking about it, but if we ever decide to get married, I still want that one next to our wedding photos. Those pictures shouldn't be put away and only pulled out because you've started to forget what her face looks like again. You loved her, you still blatantly do all these years later. She deserves a spot on the mantle just as much as I do."

After a few long moments of silence, he simply says "It looks nice."

Ren can't shake the feeling that she's done something wrong. He doesn't act any different, helps her make dinner like normal, watches some shitty movie on the couch until ten. He still kisses her, has sex with her, tells her he loves her before passing out for the night.

 

 

She gets up for a snack at around two, doing her best to not wake him. After eating one of his toaster strudels, she starts to make her way back to the bedroom. The light from her phone's flashlight glares off of the pictures on the mantle, and she notices something is off. Shit. She heard Leo in here messing with the pictures before he came back for bed. He probably moved the ones of Camilla privately so that he wouldn't hurt Ren's feelings. She crosses the living room, shining the light off of the various frames to see what he's done.

Right front and center where she left them, the photos of her and Leo, and Leo and Camilla are pressed together, though she's certain she left a gap between the frames. They also appear to have been pulled forward from their original spots, perfectly on display. Both of them.

**Author's Note:**

> Camilla's wedding dress looked something like [this](https://www.tidetell.com/uploads/03002422.jpg), but with short sleeves, the edges of the flowers beaded with pearl colored beads, and no train.
> 
> Comments and kudos are always appreciated!
> 
> I have [my blog](http://iwillpooponthefloor.tumblr.com) on tumblr, if you'd like to check that out. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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